ROUND 15 | AZERBAIJAN

Weaving through the City of WindsWeaving through the City of Winds

2026 SEASON

A decade of racing in the Land of Fire

It's 10 years since the Baku City Circuit first welcomed Formula One, for a Grand Prix that has gone from strength to strength in the intervening decade. Features like the longest full-throttle section in F1 and the narrowest corner have moved from being novelty talking points to simply elements of racing in Azerbaijan, supplanted by a wealth of stories from a street race with a reputation for drama.

We had a tough weekend in Madrid, but have a chance to bounce back here at a circuit where both drivers have done mighty things in the past. It's also a Baku debut for Mari, coming on the back of points in the Madring Sprint, racing here in Azerbaijan for the first time, with Formula 2 coming out on the road as its season approaches the end-game.

RACE STARTS IN:

days

hrs

mins

secs

Session Times

FP1

FP2

FP3

Quali

Race

Toggle below to highlight parts of the track.

Sectors
Turns
Straight Mode
Overtake Mode

The castle section is the tightest on the F1 calendar and you have to really thread the needle. It's one of the coolest moments of the year.

Jak Crawford – Third Driver

Number of corners
20
Number of laps
51
Race distance
306.049km

NEED TO KNOW: AZERBAIJAN GP

THE CIRCUIT

THE GRAND PRIX

THE STRATEGY

THE FACTS

THE TRAVEL GUIDE

LAST TIME OUT

THE CIRCUIT

The Baku City Circuit is quirky, with the primary quirk being 2.2km long and approached with the right foot firmly planted. The main straight (which isn't really straight) is the longest full-throttle section of track in F1, out dragging the Spa section from La Source to Les Combes by around 200m. It's a tricky proposition for car setup.

Tricky because it's very different to the rest of the circuit. Main straight aside, Baku is very much in the mould of the modern street circuit. It has low grip and an awful lot of low-speed, 90° corners and, at least while Marina Bay is in its shortened form, the most gear changes of any F1 lap.

Braking performance is a big issue in Baku. It's one of the toughest circuits for the brakes, with a sequence of heavy stops around much of the lap. The natural desire with this is to build a car with plenty of brake cooling – but once again the issue is that long straight: running maximum brake cooling works for the rest of the lap – but the brakes will get very, very cold on the straight – which isn't ideal for a car that's hitting the brakes at 355kph, trying to stop for the tight turn one. As with everything in Baku, getting this compromise right requires careful thought.

The interesting wrinkle this year, in common with places like Monza and Las Vegas, is how the addition of active aero impacts the lap. With the low-drag aero configurations made redundant by straight mode and corner mode, these cars are going to feel more planted in the corners – but this is a circuit where overconfidence often ends in a visit to the barriers.

THE GRAND PRIX

Of all the city races on the F1 calendar, Azerbaijan feels like the most 'citified', circling the UNESCO World Heritage site of the Baku Citadel, home of the Maiden Tower and Palace of the Shirvanshahs, after flashing down streets of apartment blocks and before running parallel to the Caspian Sea corniche.

As with many street circuits, opportunities to construct grandstands are limited, so the bulk of the seats are on the main straight, primarily built on the seaward side, facing the city, and with the fanzones located behind. At most circuits, those closest to the first corner would be most likely to see overtaking moves, but such is the length of the straight in Baku, any of the grandstands between T20-T1 get to see plenty of action, meaning the primary attractions of the final/first Absheron grandstands are that it is opposite the pits and, should the weather turn, is the only grandstand with a roof.

Neftchilar Avenue, the road that forms the main straight, is a wide boulevard, and at one point the track runs along it in both directions. Thus, the grandstands further along get a good view of the T5-T6 left-right flick, and the more substantial corner at T7. This aside, there aren't many views of the interior section of track, with the best locations tending to be private balconies. There is, however, a grandstand at the kink between T10-T12. While this is quite a low-speed section of track, it does provide a stunning backdrop of the Citadel, for anyone who's chasing the perfect F1 picture.

Finally, what's loosely described as the main straight stretches all the way from T16 to T1, with T16 being the last real corner. It has grandstands inside and outside, and is a decent place to get a good appreciation of F1 cars under heavy braking as they come down the hill. It's not usually an overtaking zone, but it's definitely an action zone during Qualifying, with cars trying to cling to track limits while seeking a good exit. It's here you discover who's looked after their tyres better through the first 15 corners and can still count on enough grip to stay within the white lines.

THE STRATEGY

Given the C6 tyre no-longer exists, Baku is nominally a step harder for 2026, which makes strategy choices… interesting. Last year's race was (almost) a uniform one-stop with no-one running a Soft tyre, and the only real choice being Hard-Medium or Medium-Hard. Degradation, however, was not particularly a factor, with the Medium tyre doing over 70 per cent of the race distance for a couple of drivers (including Lance) and the Hard capable of doing the entire 51 laps.

Estaban Ocon's race was noteworthy. He pitted at the end of lap one under a Safety Car to swap from Hard to Medium, and then swapped again on lap two, back to the Hard to complete the race on that. There is, therefore, no reason to expect anything other than a one-stop race this year – and potentially on the softer compounds.

In real terms, the pit-window was as wide as anyone wants it to be, and the undercut power will likely be low, meaning a stop for one car won't necessarily trigger a mass rush to the pits from others – but it can be used as getting some clean air. Given the vast full throttle section of track between T16 and T1, there's a belief Baku should be a festival of overtaking. The reality is a little different. Last year had 25 overtakes – six of which came on the Safety Car restart. For a car stuck in a train, unable to use all of its pace, pitting can be a way out.

THE FACTS

1 | The Azerbaijan Grand Prix has been held eight times. The inaugural race was held in 2017, and the country skipped 2020 due to Covid restrictions. Every race has been held at the Baku City Circuit.

2 | The circuit made its debut in 2016, when it hosted the Grand Prix of Europe. The title, as an honorific, goes back over a century. As an individual, named grand prix, it's been running, off and on, since 1983, held at Brands Hatch, the Nürburgring, Donington, Jerez, Valencia and, finally, Baku.

3 | The Azerbaijan Grand Prix has the peculiar distinction of taking place below sea-level. At its lowest point, on the start-finish straight, it is 24.7m below sea-level – or 2.253km below the calendar high-point at the Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez.

4 | The circuit features the narrowest section of track in F1 – just 7.6m wide at Turn Eight, where it turns up the hill into the Old City.

5 | Lance had his first podium finish in Baku, finishing third in the 2017 Azerbaijan Grand Prix for Williams.

6 | Sebastian Vettel's second place in 2021 was our first F1 podium finish.

7 | In 2016, during practice at the Baku City Circuit, Valtteri Bottas was recorded at 378kph – the fastest speed recorded during a grand prix weekend.

8 | The 2025 Azerbaijan Grand Prix holds the record for the most stoppages during Qualifying, with six red flags.

THE TRAVEL GUIDE

Since Azerbaijan first appeared on the F1 calendar, it's become one of the more popular destinations for tourists from the F1 heartlands seeking a race experience a little further afield – and Baku itself probably isn't what first-time visitors expect.

Much of the imagery of the race is built up around the UNESCO World Heritage Site of the Old City, most notably the 12th Century Maiden Tower and 15th Century Palace of the Shirvanshahs but walking around the streets immediately adjacent to the track, the impression is more like being in… Paris. Petrochemical wealth led to wide, pedestrianised boulevards linking parks, squares, and boutique shopping arcades which, during race week, turn into an illuminated café culture after the track action has finished.

The track is also bordered by the Caspian Sea. The sea – which, in reality, is the world's largest lake – has a sequence of beach clubs and harbours close to the circuit, from which all sorts of boat trips and dinner cruises set sail – though Baku is known as the City of Winds, with a cooler northern wind (Khazri) and warmer southern wind (Gilavar) alternating but blowing constantly. They create headaches for race engineers, but make Baku a very popular destination for windsurfing, flyboarding and parasailing.

Slightly further afield it's a city of modern architecture, with the Zaha Hadid-designed Heydar Aliyev Centre and the famous Flame Towers, which riff on Azerbaijan's nickname, The Land of Fire.

That nickname, like much of the wealth in the region, is derived from the natural gas sources close to Baku, best seen 20km to the north of the city at Yanar Dag – which translates as 'Burning Mountain', where gas seeps through the sandstone and flames perpetually burn at a protected historical and cultural site, linked with the ancient Zoroastrian religion.

Leave the city in the other direction and a couple of hours down the Caspian Coast, you'll get to Gobustan National Park, famed for… mud volcanoes. These aren't actual volcanoes, but rather calderas of mud, forced to the surface via a mix of gas pressure and tectonic activity. If you've ever wanted to visit an alien planet, this is the place to go in the meantime. The park is also famed for its petroglyphs, which in some places date back 15,000 years.

LAST TIME OUT

Baku has been a happy place for Aston Martin, with the team, despite a few very tough weekends, often scoring good points. 2021 was a torrid weekend for Lance, with a crash in Qualifying relegating him to the back of the field. A good recovery drive had him up to P4 when a tyre failure pitched him into the barriers at high speed. Seb, however, had a storming drive to the podium. He started P11 and steadily made ground all through the race, running a longer first stint than his rivals. It paid dividends after the Safety Car bought the field back together after Lance's crash, when, with younger rubber, he was able to pick-off cars ahead. He looked set for a solid fourth place finish, until the red flag came out when Max Verstappen in the lead had the same crash as Lance. The race was restarted for one flying lap. Lewis Hamilton locked-up at the first corner, Seb avoided the Mercedes and collected P2, and our first podium.

2022 was less dramatic… but not in itself lacking in drama. Lance was unlucky to be eliminated in Q1. He ran wide on his first attempt, then couldn't get another go as the session was red-flagged in the final minute. Seb, however, made it through to Q3 and started in P9. Lance's race ended early, with the car called in to retire with extreme vibrations, but Seb went on to finish P6, having made a very early pit-stop to take advantage of a VSC.

2023 had the novelty of a Sprint race in Baku, and so our first double points finish was actually a quadruple points weekend. The Sprint format in 2023 had race Qualifying on Friday, followed by Saturday given over in its entirety to the Sprint format, thus we had Fernando and Lance both making it through to Q3 on Friday, then finishing sixth and eighth respectively in the Sprint, before going back into race mode to finish fourth and seventh on Sunday. Unsurprisingly, it's our best points haul to date in Baku.

2024 was a little more sedate. Having bounced around the calendar, the race moved to a September date. Lance didn't have a lot of luck, recording his third DNF in four outings for us, when braking problems caused him to stop with six laps remaining. Fernando, however, came home P6.

Sadly, last year was our first time to come away from Baku empty-handed. After both cars were eliminated in Q2, the team elected to split strategies. While both started the race with a Medium tyre, Fernando stopped early to attempt an undercut, while Lance went very long. In a race where overtaking proved difficult, and with no interruptions after a first lap Safety Car, neither could make an impact, Fernando coming home P15 and Lance P17.